A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

marienbad · 21-04-2014 5:30pm

Debt

What do I owe to you
Who loved me deep and long?
You never gave my spirit wings
Or gave my heart a song.

But oh, to him I loved,
Who loved me not at all,
I owe the open gate
That led through heaven’s wall

Sara Teasdale

Swiper the fox · 21-04-2014 6:30pm

marienbad wrote: »

Debt

What do I owe to you
Who loved me deep and long?
You never gave my spirit wings
Or gave my heart a song.

But oh, to him I loved,
Who loved me not at all,
I owe the open gate
That led through heaven’s wall

Sara Teasdale

That is superb, hadn't come across her before, cheers. You can't beat a poem that says so much in so few words.

Loss
The day he moved out was terrible -
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn't a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.

Wendy Cope

marienbad · 21-04-2014 8:02pm

Swiper the fox wrote: »

That is superb, hadn't come across her before, cheers. You can't beat a poem that says so much in so few words.

Loss
The day he moved out was terrible -
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn't a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.

Wendy Cope

I just can't understand how Sara Teasdale is not more well known , I have posted a few of her poems here ( I think ) . Glad you like her .

feargale · 22-04-2014 1:00am

TO THE CUCKOO

O blithe newcomer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice:
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?

While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear;
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off and near.

Though babbling only to the vale
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;

The same whom in my schoolboy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.

To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen!

And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.

O blessed birth! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, fairy place,
That is fit home for Thee!

- William Wordsworth ( 1770 - 1850 )

feargale · 22-04-2014 1:17am

I hope the above offering isn't unseasonably premature.

marienbad · 22-04-2014 6:08pm

With advent of the Endeavour TV series I am going through an Inspector Morse nostalgia fest and so I remembered this -

The Remorseful Day

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play,
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound,
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

A.E.Housman

Swiper the fox · 23-04-2014 4:01pm

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

feargale · 24-04-2014 3:29pm

COUNTY DISPARITIES ( as per page 2, Irish Times today. )

The Dubs and their neighbours Kildare
Have loads of old lolly to spare,
But in poor Donegal
The folks have folkall,
And Monaghan men are threadbare.

Swiper the fox · 24-04-2014 8:15pm

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

jakobgallagher · 25-04-2014 1:33pm

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

tomasocarthaigh · 29-04-2014 12:31am

"The Walking People"

In times past they were craftsmen skilled
But today they have no skill
That has a value in the modern world
As they head for the next hill
For over it is the wide world beyond
A road they travel until
Death in his time comes traveling
The road that they have long trod
And an angel says to them they can
Camp forever beside God

Three Men Dead
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/Three-Men-Dead
Curse of the Common People
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/The-Curse-of-the-Common-People
Listening to a Man Discuss a Friends Death
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/Listening-to-a-Man-discuss-a-Friends-Death
Clonony Castle Story
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/For-Hand-In-Marraige-A-Castle-Given-The-Clononey-Castle-Story-and-Anne-Boleyn
To Walk in Nature
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/To-Walk-in-Nature-is-to-Say-a-Prayer
Arvagh
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/Arvagh
I Wish Cows Would Say Hello
http://www.writingsinrhyme.com/index.php/I-Wish-Cows-Would-Say-Hello,-And-Dogs-Quiet-Would-Keep

SmallTeapot · 29-04-2014 12:57am

All credit to Swiper the Fox for signposting Wendys Copes' work for me

Really like the simplicity and flow of her work

I hope it's ok, but here's more W. Cope for the thread.

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

– Wendy Cope

AFTER THE LUNCH

On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,
the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I've fallen in love

On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?

On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.
the head does its best but the heart is the boss-
I admit it before I am halfway across

- Wendy Cope

Swiper the fox · 29-04-2014 9:26am

Great stuff teapot, the same thing happened to me on this thread a while back. I had read that Orange poem on a poem of the day in the daily telegraph and i posted it here, it's my wife's favourite poem ever. Another poster recommended her other work to me, very easy to read

Swiper the fox · 30-04-2014 3:57pm

Answer to a Child’s Question

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772 - 1834

marienbad · 01-05-2014 12:46am

Faults

They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them over one by one;
I laughed aloud when they were done,
I knew them all so well before, —
Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.

Sara Teasdale

Swiper the fox · 04-05-2014 5:02pm

Interesting new anthology has been released called "Poems That Make Grown Men Cry", I haven't seen it yet but will probably pick it up sometime this week. This was the choice of Seamus Heaney, it was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of Hardy's first wife.

The Voice

By Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

ivytwine · 09-05-2014 8:13pm

Hesh's Umpire wrote: »

The Planter's Daughter - Austin Clarke

When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.

Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went -
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

That last line gets me every time!

Oh, I adore that one. Whatever you think about advertising, I would never have heard that without Bord na Mona using it with the Marino Waltz a couple of years ago.

I love the drama of this, I love Plath in general but I read this in LC and it sparked my imagination. Probably has been one of the greatest influences on my own writing.

FINISTERRE

Sylvia Plath

This was the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,
Cramped on nothing. Black
Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding
With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,
Whitened by the faces of the drowned.
Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks ---
Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.
The sea cannons into their ear, but they don't budge.
Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells
Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,
Almost too small for the mists to bother with.
The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia ---
Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.
They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.
They go up without hope, like sighs.
I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.
When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,
Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.
A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot
A peasant woman in black
Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.
Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size,
Her lips sweet with divinity.
She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying ---
She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.

Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts
Beside the postcard stalls.
The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:
"These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,
Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.
They do not come from with Bay of the Dead down there,
But from another place, tropical and blue,
We have never been to.
These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold."

Swiper the fox · 12-05-2014 5:13pm

I've spent the last twenty minutes or so reading Pat Ingoldsby poems on the net

Conversation With A Garda In
Grafton Street
by Pat Ingoldsby

A couple of years back I paused in Grafton Street
and leaned against a litter bin to listen to a busker.

A large garda appeared beside me.

“Are you selling anything that you shouldn’t be selling?”
he said.

“I’m just enjoying the sunshine and the music”

“Yeah but are you selling anything that you shouldn’t
be selling”

“I’m simply enjoying the music.”

PAUSE

“You’re wearing an awful lot of jewellery all the same.”

“That is none of your business” I said.

“I was just making conversation” he said.

Lovely.

Another quick one

Things to do in a buggy

Locate a foot. Pull off a sock.
Toss it over the side. Start again.

Dave! · 26-05-2014 9:40pm

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

Swiper the fox · 31-05-2014 10:57am

Lullaby

W. H. Auden, 1907 - 1973
.

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Rory Gallagher · 31-05-2014 5:35pm

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

W.B YEATS

feargale · 01-06-2014 12:54am

June

Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers' fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass seas,
And bobbing poppies flare like Elmo's light,
While siren-like the pollen-staind bees
Drone in the clover depths. And up the height
The cuckoo's voice is hoarse and broke with joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make raid,
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer's boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah, in the shade
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
That snares your little ear, for June is short
And we must joy in it and dance and sing,
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay! soon the swallows will be flying south,
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses spilt on youth's red mouth
Will soon blow down the road all roses go.

Francis Ledwidge ( 1887 - 1917 )

donegal_man · 01-06-2014 2:31am

O'Rourke's Feast

O'Rourke's noble fare - Will ne'er be forgot
By those who were there - Or those who were not.
His revels to keep, - We sup and we dine
On seven score sheep, Fat bullocks and swine

Usequebaugh to our feast - In pails was brought up,
A hundred at least, - And the madder our cup,
O there is the sport! - We rise with the light
In disorderly sort, - From snoring all night.

O how I was trick'd! - My pipe it was broke,
My pocket was pick'd - I lost my new cloak.
I'm rifled, quoth Nell, - Of mantle and kercher,
Why then fare them well, - The de'il take the searcher.

Come, harper, strike up; - But, first, by your favour,
Boy, give me a cup: - Ah! this hath some savour

Hugh MacGauran (Set to music by Turlough O'Carolan)

feargale · 03-06-2014 1:27am

Tiananmen by James Fenton ( 1949 - )

Tianamen
Is broad and clean
And you can’t tell
Where the dead have been
And you can’t tell
What happened then
And you can’t speak
Of Tianamen.

You must not speak.
You must not think.
You must not dip
Your brush in ink.
You must not say
What happened then,
What happened there.
In Tiananmen.

The cruel men
Are old and deaf
Ready to kill
But short of breath
And they will die
Like other men
And they’ll lie in state
In Tianamen.

They lie in state.
They lie in style.
Another lie’s
Thrown on the pile,
Thrown on the pile
By the cruel men
To cleanse the blood
From Tianamen.

Truth is a secret.
Keep it dark.
Keep it dark.
In our heart of hearts.
Keep it dark
Till you know when
Truth may return
To Tiananmen.

Tiananmen
Is broad and clean
And you can’t tell
Where the dead have been
And you can’t tell
When they’ll come again.
They’ll come again
To Tiananmen.

Hong Kong, 15 June 1989

Swiper the fox · 04-06-2014 4:38pm

Walking Away by Cecil Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

donegal_man · 05-06-2014 12:11am

HAIKU

To Convey One's Mood
In Seventeen Syllables
Is Very Diffic

John Cooper Clarke

tomasocarthaigh · 09-06-2014 1:19am

Gene Barry of the Blackwater Poets got a group of us together to write tribute poems for the tragic Tuam Babies, and all the other unknowns across the island.

Due to respecting the copywrite of the other authors I cannot share their work which is much much better than mine, but I will publish my humble and inadequate offering as a memorial.

"Dignity After Death"

Dedicated to the children murdered through neglect in Orphanages in Ireland. { Disclaimer, this is a POV piece (point of view), and as Im of the pro life position, I highlight the hypocrisy of their use of the position I hold dear. I respect others point of view on the issue,and the piece is not intended to provoke debate of argument on the abortion issue.}

Life is sacred, God given, they preach
Illegitimate's are the Devils children,sin begotten, they teach
Abortion is wrong - and it is, but within
Is there any difference between a septic tank and an abortionists bin?

Its a short four line piece, the lack of words belays the lack of what to say at the realization of the horrors of that "home" and the others like it.

Another poem on the same theme is below, along with other poems of mine.

Ferryman and His Fare (Tuam Babies Tribute)

Through Faults Perfect Life (Maya Angelou Tribute)

Lest A Man Fall Foul of the Midnight Court - a humerous look of how the author would fare if it were he and not Brian Merriman at the Midnight Court, and if it were NOT a dream!

Swiper the fox · 09-06-2014 7:07pm

The Fisherman

Although I can see him still—
The freckled man who goes
To a gray place on a hill
In gray Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies—
It’s long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I’d looked in the face
What I had hoped it would be
To write for my own race
And the reality:
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved—
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer—
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face
And gray Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark with froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream—
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, “Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.”

W.B Yeats.

Dave! · 09-06-2014 10:02pm

When You Are Old
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ttlSOHESJE

wreade1872 · 10-06-2014 6:23pm

Of Shop Windows
Looking closely at the glass windows of my shop,
I see in them the whole of my shop reflected.
Looking at my windows closely from the street,
I see in them the life of the street reflected.
Yet if I stand away, the glass remains transparent,
And I see clearly through it to the things beyond.

If I look with close vision
Into the hearts of men,
I see my own small heart reflected.
I will try henceforth not to look at them too closely.

From the book of poetry i'm currently reading:
'The Songbook of Quong Lee of Limehouse' by Thomas Burke.

I'm not entirely sure you should be able to call stuff poetry if it doesn't rhyme, but i will admit this stuff does have a certain something about it

.

A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

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